Finding “the One”
As a fortysomething woman in politics, finding a partner was tricky for Kamala Harris – until she went on a date with Doug Emhoff. In this extract from her memoir, the US Vice President goes back to the day she met the love of her life in 2013.
I
was in the middle of a meeting, and my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. I ignored her call the first several times, but then I started to get worried. My best friend, Chrisette, was blowing up my phone. Her children are my godchildren.
Had something happened? I stepped out and called her.
“What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“Yes, everything is great. You’re going on a date,” she said.
“I am?”
“You are,” she replied with total certainty. “I just met this guy. He’s cute and he’s the managing partner of his law firm, and I think you’re going to really like him. He’s based in Los Angeles, but you’re always here for work anyway.”
Chrisette is like a sister to me, and I knew there was no use in arguing with her.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“His name is Doug Emhoff, but promise me you won’t Google him. Don’t overthink it. Just meet him. I already gave him your number.
He’s going to reach out.”
Part of me groaned, but at the same time, I appreciated Chrisette’s takecharge approach. She was one of the only people to whom I could talk candidly about my personal life. As a single, professional woman in my 40s, and very much in the public eye [as California attorney general], dating wasn’t easy. I knew that if I brought a man with me to an event, people would immediately start to speculate about our relationship. I also knew that single women in politics are viewed differently than single men. We don’t get the same latitude when it comes to our social lives.
I had no interest in inviting that kind of scrutiny unless I was close to sure I’d found “the One” – which meant that for years, I kept my personal life compartmentalised from my career.
A few nights later, I was on my way to an event when I received a text from a number I didn’t recognise. Doug was watching a basketball game with a friend, and he’d worked up the courage to send me an awkward text. “Hey! It’s Doug. Just saying hi! I’m at the Lakers game.” I wrote back to say hi, and we made plans to talk the following day. Then I punctuated it with my own bit of awkwardness – “Go Lakers!” – even though I’m really a [Golden State] Warriors fan.
The next morning, I was leaving the gym before work when I noticed that I had missed a call from Doug. Even though I had suggested we connect the following day, I hadn’t expected him to reach out that early. But I found it pretty endearing, I’ll admit.
The voicemail, which I still have saved to this day, was long and a little rambling. He sounded like a nice guy, though, and I was intrigued to learn more. Doug, on the other hand, was pretty sure that he had ruined his chances. The way he tells it, he thought his voicemail had been disastrous and that he’d likely never hear from me again. But fate was smiling on us.
I found myself with a free hour for lunch – something that almost never happened. So I decided I’d give Doug a call. He answered, and we ended up on the phone for the entire hour. It sounds corny, I know, but the conversation just flowed; and even though I’m sure that both of us were trying extra hard to seem witty and interesting, most of all I remember us cracking each other up, joking and laughing at ourselves and with each other, just the way we do now. We made dinner plans for Saturday night in Los Angeles. I could hardly wait to fly down.
The morning after our first date, Doug emailed me with all of his available dates for the next couple of months. “I’m too old to play games or hide the ball,” the email read. “I really like you, and I want to see if we can make this work.”
We planned a second date for later that week instead.
For our third date, Doug decided that a grand gesture was in order. He flew to Sacramento to meet me for dinner. After that, we knew we had something special. We agreed to commit to each other for six months, and to re-evaluate our relationship at the end of it. Attending a speech about the ills of truancy isn’t exactly what most people think of as a romantic date, but the event was Doug’s coming out – the first time
I’d invited him to join me at a professional gathering.
My team would later refer to that era as A.D. – “After Doug”. They loved how much he made me laugh. I did, too.
Doug had been married once before, and he had two kids, Cole and Ella – named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. When Doug and I first started dating, Ella was in middle school and Cole was in high school; Doug shared custody with his first wife, Kerstin.
I had – and have – tremendous admiration and respect for Kerstin. I could tell from the way Doug talked about his kids that she was a terrific mother – and in later months, as Kerstin and I got to know each other, we really hit it off ourselves and became friends. (We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional.)
After our second date, Doug was ready to introduce me to Cole and Ella, and I was eager to meet them, too. But as a child of divorce, I knew how hard it can be when your parents start to date other people.
So I slowed things down. Other than occasionally talking to the kids when Doug had me on speakerphone in the car, I wanted to make sure that Doug and I had something real and lasting before I waded into Cole’s and Ella’s lives.
Doug and I put a lot of thought into when and how that first meeting should transpire. We waited until about two months after we’d met, although in my memory it feels like we’d been together for a long time – maybe because the build-up was so great, or because, by the time the big day finally arrived, I felt like I’d loved Doug for years.
I woke up that morning feeling incredibly excited, but also with some butterflies in my stomach. Until that moment, I’d known Cole and Ella as gorgeous faces in Doug’s photographs, charming characters in his stories, the central figures in his heart. Now I was finally going to meet these two amazing young people. It was a momentous occasion.
On my way home from my LA office, I picked up a tin of cookies and tied a festive ribbon in a bow around it. I got rid of my suit, changed into jeans and my Chuck Taylors, took a few deep breaths, and got a ride to Doug’s house. On the way over, I tried to imagine how the first few minutes would go. I ran scenarios in my head and tried to land on the perfect things to say. The tin of cookies was sitting beside me on the seat, a silent witness to my rehearsing. Would the kids think the cookies were really nice or really weird? Maybe the ribbon was too much.
The ribbon was probably too much. But Cole and Ella could not have been more welcoming. They’d been wanting to meet me, too. We talked for a few minutes, then piled into Doug’s car for dinner together. Doug and I had decided the kids should choose where we ate, to make everything as comfortable as possible. They’d picked a place that had been a favourite since they were younger – a seafood hut off the Pacific Coast Highway. It was about an hour away in traffic, which gave us some quality car time to get to know one another. Cole, it turned out, was a music aficionado, and he was excited to share some of his latest discoveries with me.
“I just started listening to Roy Ayers,” he said. “Do you know him?”
I sang back: “Everybody loves the sunshine, sunshine, folks get down in the sunshine …”
“You know it!”
“Of course I know it!”
We put on the song, and then another and another. The four of us sang together with the windows rolled down as we drove up the coast to dinner. Doug later joked that I got completely inundated with their lives that night, but I think it’s more accurate to say that I was hooked, and Cole and Ella reeled me in.
At the end of March 2014, I had two trips planned. One was to Mexico, where I was coordinating with senior officials in the fight against transnational criminal organisations and human traffickers.
The other was to Italy, where Doug and I were looking forward to a romantic getaway. The respective itineraries were, in a word, different.
At home, Doug and I stayed up late looking at pictures and guidebooks and planning our itinerary for Florence. At the office, I was working to put together and lead a bipartisan delegation of state attorneys general to join me in Mexico City.
On March 26, 2014, I arrived back from Mexico feeling like the trip had been a real success. But it was late in the evening when I got home, and
now I had a small problem: my trip with Doug was starting early the next morning, and I’d had no time to pack.
Shortly after I arrived at my apartment, Doug texted to say he was on his way from the airport. When he got to the apartment, I was in the middle of a frantic search. I couldn’t find my black pants, and I was intensely frustrated about it.
It was ridiculous, of course, but it was one of those moments when the balancing act caught up with me – a balancing act that many working women, and some men, know all too well. Just like my mother, I’ve internalised the idea that everything I do deserves 100 percent, but sometimes it feels like the numbers won’t work. There just isn’t enough of me to go around. This was one of those times.
As a result, I was frazzled, and when Doug arrived he seemed out of sorts as well. He was acting strange – a little stiff, a little quiet.
“Do you mind if we get take-out instead of going out to eat?” I asked him. “I didn’t plan for this very well and I need time to pack.”
“Of course,” he said. “How about the Thai place we like?”
“Sounds great,” I replied. I rifled through a kitchen drawer and produced a tattered paper menu. “How about pad Thai?”
Doug turned to me. “I want to spend my life with you.”
That was sweet, but he was always sweet like that. Truth be told, I didn’t register the significance of what he’d said at all. I didn’t even look up. My mind was still on the black pants.
“That’s nice, honey,” I said, rubbing his arm as I looked over the menu. “Should we have chicken or shrimp on the pad Thai?”
“No, I want to spend my life with you,” he said again. When I looked up, he was getting down on one knee. He’d concocted an elaborate plan to propose to me in front of the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence. But once he had the ring, it was burning a hole in his pocket. He couldn’t keep it secret.
I looked at him there, on one knee, and burst into tears. Mind you, these were not graceful Hollywood tears streaming down a glistening cheek. No, I’m talking about snorting and grunting, with mascara smudging my face. Doug reached for my hand and I held my breath and smiled back. Then he asked me to marry him, and I bellowed a tear-soaked “Yes!”
Doug and I were married on
Friday, August 22, 2014, in an intimate ceremony with the people we loved. [My sister] Maya officiated; [my niece] Meena read from Maya Angelou. In keeping with our respective Indian and Jewish heritage, I put a flower garland around
Doug’s neck, and he stomped on a glass. And then it was done.
Cole, Ella, and I agreed that we didn’t like the term “stepmom”. Instead they call me their “Momala”.